Chapter 13 Finley’s Interlude
Finley’s Interlude
Finley MacDonald is four years old.
He loves the color green, but his most favorite color is blue. He can count all the way to one hundred, though he forgets the number thirty sometimes. And when he grows up, he’s going to be a pirate.
His parents drop him off at his grandmother’s house for a week in June, and it’s the longest he’s ever been away from home.
He loves his grandma, but her house smells like mothballs, and the room he sleeps in is too hot, and her macaroni and cheese is all wrong, not at all like the kind his mom makes.
His stomach aches and there’s a hollow feeling in his chest and a thick lump in his throat that never seems to go away.
At first, his grandma thinks he’s coming down with something, a summer flu maybe.
But no amount of ginger ale and saltines and Wheel of Fortune can make him feel better.
His eyes sting with tears and his face goes hot when he finally confesses that he misses his mama.
Finn is homesick, his grandma says, finally putting a name to this feeling he’s never felt before.
At the end of the week, his parents pick him up, and that first night, his mama makes macaroni and cheese the right way, letting him squeeze the sauce into the pot from the shiny silver pouch that comes inside the box.
He was good for his grandma, so his parents are going to let him pick out what color to paint his bedroom because he’s a big boy now and big boys get to make important decisions.
His most favorite color might be blue, but lately he’s been dreaming of the color green.
Of gently sloped valleys and rolling green hills, forests with tall trees and plenty of mountains Finn could climb.
He’s happy to be home and back in his own bed, but for some reason, that homesick feeling never fully goes away.
Finn is six years old.
He likes school. Miss Christie, his teacher, says he’s super smart.
He can write his whole name and a bunch of other words, too, even though sometimes he writes his letters backward, which Miss Christie says is okay because practice makes perfect and he’ll get the hang of it eventually.
He knows all the shapes and how to add and take away numbers, and now Miss Christie is helping the class memorize their addresses and phone numbers and teaching them all about who they’re supposed to call for help if they need it.
His mom helps him fill out the worksheet he brings home with him.
He lives at 555 Fern Street, which isn’t hard to memorize, because it’s just the same number times three and ferns are a plant and green is still his second-favorite color.
If there’s ever a big emergency like a fire and his mom and dad aren’t around, his mom says he’s supposed to dial 911 and tell them his address and name and what’s wrong and they’ll send help.
And if he ever gets lost and he can’t find his way home, he’s supposed to find a trusted adult and ask them for help.
All this talk about being lost makes that homesick feeling rear its ugly head.
He goes to bed that night on an empty stomach, too unwell to eat the pot roast his mom made.
It takes him a long time to fall asleep, and when he does, he dreams of a castle sitting on a moss-covered cliff, high above the sea.
Finn is ten years old.
It’s a rainy Tuesday in March when his dad goes to the grocery store for milk and doesn’t come home.
(Finn will later learn it’s such a fucking cliché that it’s almost funny, but right now he’s not laughing.) His mom doesn’t seem sad, but she’s definitely angry, staying up until all hours of the night talking to Miss Martha on the phone, saying things Finn knows he’s not meant to hear.
She calls his dad a fucking coward and wonders How could he do this to Finn?
Apparently his dad left his mom a note. He didn’t leave Finn one, leading Finn to ask his mom if he did something wrong.
For the first time since his dad left, his mom cries.
Finn didn’t do a damn thing wrong, she promises.
Some people just aren’t happy. They’ll spend their whole lives searching for happiness and never find it because happiness isn’t something you find, it’s something you make.
Finn dreams of dark, loamy soil freshly turned, streaks of it on his hands.
Of a ringing bell and shrouded mirrors and oil smelling resinous and sweet.
Finn is fourteen.
The dreams change. Nights once spent dreaming of running through wild heather are now consumed with visions of his fingers tangling in long curls the color of chocolate and a demanding mouth that slants over his.
He dreams nightly of firm thighs that wrap around his waist, heels that dig into the small of his back, and full breasts that fill his hands.
Of bare skin that grows slick beneath his fingertips and blue eyes that burn into his as he comes undone. He starts doing his own laundry.
Finn is seventeen.
His friends are all starting to think about what they want to do after graduation, where they want to go to college, if they want to go to college.
Scouts have been sniffing around Monty, but he’s got his heart set on playing for Tech, mostly because that’s where Chrissy’s going.
Mark’s going to take over the bar when his uncle retires, and Peyton already knows she’s going straight to cosmetology school.
Kaitlyn wants to go to art school, illustrate children’s books one day, and Jeb says he’s going to be a chemical engineer with the sort of confidence that Finn just can’t relate to.
He’s the only one of his friends who doesn’t know what the hell he wants to do after graduation.
He thinks he’d like to travel, actually see the world he’s read about, maybe try to find the place he goes to in his dreams. But travel isn’t cheap, and his mom says she’d be fine with him leaving, but when she finds the brochures the guidance counselor gave him for Stanford and Tulane, her eyes go a little glassy.
The brochures wind up in the recycle bin and Finn pins his hopes a little closer to home.
UGA’s a good school, and it’s only an hour and a half away, and State’s even closer. Cheaper, too.
Finn is twenty-two.
He’s got a degree in business that he knows fuck-all what to do with and student loans that, before long, he’s going to have to start repaying.
He’s back in Silver Springs, back living in the house he grew up in, his bedroom still painted the same shade of green he picked out when he was four.
He starts doing odd jobs around town just to feel like he’s doing something with his life, moving forward instead of standing still while everyone passes him by.
Most of his friends are back in town, too, but they’ve got plans.
They all know what they want to do with the next chapter of their lives.
Lucky for him, Mark’s uncle decides to retire early, leaving the bar to Mark, who, god love him, can’t balance a book to save his life.
But Finn can. It doesn’t take much cajoling on Mark’s part for him to come on board, helping with the business side of things while Mark does what he does best, pouring drinks and making every person who walks through the door feel right at home.
Finn still has dreams, not every night like he used to, but sometimes. They’re the only thing he doesn’t question, the only time he doesn’t feel like something’s missing.
Finn is twenty-four.
Life is…good. He finally moves out of his mom’s house and into a duplex on the other side of town.
He goes on a string of dates set up by his friends, first dates that occasionally turn into second dates, but never thirds.
They give him grief about it, ragging on him for being picky.
Monty, who took one look at Chrissy in eighth grade and decided come hell or high water he was going to marry her one day, is the worst of them all.
Finn can’t tell them the truth. That try as he might, he can’t help but compare every girl he goes out with to the one he dreams about, the one whose face he hasn’t even seen.
That the reality of those girls who have all been perfectly lovely can’t hold a candle to how he feels when he dreams. That it’s not fair to keep seeing them when he’s measuring them against a yardstick they don’t know exists, because it doesn’t.
Not really. He knows that. He’s not crazy.
But until he finds someone who makes him want to stay up all night, reality finally better than his dreams, he’ll just have to bide his time.
Finn is twenty-eight.
The doctor calls it a glioblastoma. Brain cancer. It’s grade four, not the same as stage four, but it’s aggressive. He starts asking questions about treatment plans, and the look the doctor gives him shuts him right up. Their goal at this point is to make his mom comfortable.
The next two months pass in a blur of visits from home health care nurses and mountains of paperwork, all while his mom’s condition rapidly worsens.
When she’s not tired, she’s restless, agitated.
She’s confused more often than she isn’t.
But she has a rare moment of lucidity one morning, her eyes bright as she tells him that she hopes he’ll find someone.
Someone who feels like home. Her grip is surprisingly strong when she grabs his hands and makes him promise that if he ever finds someone like that, he won’t let them go.
His mom is dying, and she’s asked him to promise her this one thing, and he’d be the lousiest son imaginable if he didn’t do it.
Problem is, Finn’s not sure what home feels like anymore.
It happens on a Thursday, arguably his least favorite day of the week before his mom died, but it definitely is now. He calls emergency services and tells the dispatcher what happened. “555 Fern Street,” he recites when asked.